ng like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling
of their feet.

Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play.
In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande
Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars.

Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew
it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her
little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything
more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long
shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.

Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of
which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him;
but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they
flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano.

Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made
it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had
had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the
tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap
or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were
impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.

Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in
it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The
glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their
glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster
recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over
from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about
the miller.

Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent
toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes,
she sang.

"Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!"

sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for
Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it
away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.

The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been
torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if
perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To
Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of
the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her
(